Girl Trouble (10 page)

Not until the next generation is born shall we know the full extent of the mischief that these restless young girls, craving to draw attention to themselves, are doing to the race.
19

A concern for ‘the future of the race' became widespread as the new, pseudo-science of eugenics gained adherence among a variety of political groups including socialists, conservatives and feminists. Baden-Powell's misgivings were echoed by Dr Murray Leslie, writing in
The Times
in 1920. His article was headlined ‘The 1920 Girl: Competition for “The Elusive Male”'. The terrible loss of young men's lives during the Great War had deprived a generation of young women of any real hopes of marriage. Murray Leslie predicted a new wave of social unrest, powered by female discontent and disappointment. Standards of morality would plummet. Married men would be tempted by the easy availability of attractive, frustrated girls. This social butterfly type of girl was already much in evidence, he claimed, in the shape of ‘the frivolous, scantily-clad, jazzing flapper, irresponsible and undisciplined, to whom a dance, a new hat, or a man with a car' was irresistible. These girls were a danger to young men. They would stop at nothing to snare a mate: ‘Young men had dance invitations four and five deep, and our boys and young men were being spoilt before our eyes.'
20

Flappers were portrayed somewhat inconsistently as either man-hungry or boyish, vamps or lesbians. If they weren't preying on young men, they might be preying on young women. And if they
were
hungering after men then they might be displaying an appetite for the
wrong kind
of man. Indian, Arab or Chinese
men, for instance. Popular eugenics encouraged ideas about ‘racial purity'. Unease about mixed-race romantic and sexual entanglements was widespread during and after the First World War.
21
Indian soldiers recovering in British hospitals were carefully watched, and their movements were confined to hospital precincts, lest they interact too much with the local population. In Brighton's Kitchener Hospital, for instance, the town was declared ‘out of bounds for all natives except medical men and students'.
22
If men wanted to go for walks or to places of entertainment they had to do so under escort. Even so, there were scandals.
23
Race feuds in Cardiff in 1919 were attributed to black men associating with white girls. Local newspapers fretted over evidence that a ‘low type' of British girls seemed particularly attracted to black or Indian men.
24
Chinese men were thought to exercise an irresistible allure, widely suspected to be associated with the use of drugs, particularly opium.
25

The public imagination on this subject was fed by contemporary portrayals of Chinese men such as thriller writer Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu, or D. W. Griffith's silent movie
Broken Blossoms
(1919).
26
In Griffith's film, subtitled
The Yellow Man
and the Girl
, Lillian Gish plays a twelve-year-old girl, the ethereal-looking Lucy, who stars as the ultimate victim, broken by Limehouse brutality. Kicked about by her dad (‘Battling Burrows') she forms a sentimental alliance with a mysterious (and much older) poet, Cheng Huan. Their love was unsettling to contemporary audiences. Though portrayed as sexually innocent, there were strong erotic undertones of the forbidden. Viewers were titillated, charmed – and to some extent reassured – by her innocence and frailty. Lucy was certainly no flapper.

‘Real-life' scandals fuelled concern that was based on fascination as well as fear. The deaths of two young women, Billie
Carleton and Freda Kempton, attracted massive newspaper coverage.
27
Both deaths were associated with drug use. Billie Carleton was a pretty twenty-two-year-old actress found dead in her bed in a suite at the Savoy hotel in 1918. She had just returned from a victory ball to celebrate the end of the war. The inquest that followed brought to light Carleton's adventurous social and sexual life, her predilection for opium and pyjama parties, and her heavy drug habit. She was nonetheless widely portrayed as a victim, as a ‘broken butterfly'. Her friend Reggie de Veuille was charged and acquitted of manslaughter, but went to gaol for having supplied her with prohibited drugs. The cocaine and opium were said to have come from a Scottish woman, Ada, and her Chinese husband Lau Ping You, in Limehouse. Four years later Freda Kempton, a young dance instructress at a nightclub in central London, died after an overdose of cocaine. She had earlier spent time with a Chinese restaurant proprietor and drug dealer, ‘Brilliant' Chang. There was no proof that Chang had supplied the cocaine which killed Kempton. But the newspapers nevertheless went to town with warnings about the Yellow Peril. Chang cut a handsome figure, he was suave and well-dressed, and there was no doubt that women found him attractive. This intensified reactions in the press, which tried to explain the attraction in terms of the ‘strange powers of magnetism' possessed by the Chinese, or of drug-induced hypnosis. The image of Limehouse as a warren of perfumed dope dens where evil Chinamen lay in wait for innocent young girls became even more entrenched. As in discussions of white slavery before the war, many found it easier to see young women as victims, rather than to accept that they might make choices which others judged as undesirable.

If fancying non-white men was seen as undesirable in young girls, the prospect of their being seduced by other women was
at least as worrying. ‘Clemence Dane' was the pen name of Winifred Ashton. Her novel about life in a girls' school,
Regiment of
Women
, was published in 1917.
28
Its subject unsettled those who thought their daughters safe in an all-female environment. The plot centres on the story of Alwynne Durand, a young teacher in Utterbridge Girls' School, who is befriended by the charismatic deputy head, Clare Harthill. Miss Harthill is portrayed as sophisticated and highly intelligent. She is also unscrupulous and worldly. She is shown to exercise an unhealthy influence over younger pupils and mistresses, for whom she becomes a kind of female Svengali or poisonous role model. There are hints of vampirism. One of Clare's pupils, emotionally unbalanced by her schoolgirl passion for the schoolmistress, kills herself. Alwynne is rescued in the nick of time by Roger, a straight, healthy, no-nonsense male. Winifred Ashton, who had some experience as a teacher, continued to write about what she saw as the real dangers of emotional attachments in girls' schools. These could not be simply dismissed as harmless crushes or ‘pashes', she warned. Some female teachers were selfish and manipulative, and could indeed be described as ‘vampire women'.
29
Coeducation, she suggested, was the only answer.

Regiment of Women
hinted darkly about the dangers of same-sex attraction in women. Radclyffe Hall's landmark novel about lesbianism,
The Well
of Loneliness
, was published in 1928, attracting widespread and scandalised attention, alongside legal challenges in England and America. The editor of the popular British newspaper the
Sunday Express
famously remarked that he would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than let them read the novel.
30
Before the publication of
The Well of Loneliness
, however, Winifred Ashton was not the only writer to focus on what were seen as the dangers of homosexual attachment in
single-sex schools and colleges.
31
The close female friendships engendered by the suffrage movement were often viewed with suspicion. In 1921 a proposal to criminalise lesbianism (by creating a new offence of gross indecency applying to sexual acts between women) was considered by the House of Lords. It was defeated largely because it was feared that to draw attention even to the possibilities of such behaviour would besmirch the innocence of the average girl.
32

The idea that women teachers might exercise a dangerous influence over young girls persisted. Even if they weren't sexual inverts, it was feared that they might be rampant feminists. The attitude of some male teachers didn't help. The highly sexist National Association of Schoolmasters, implacably opposed to equal pay, was relentlessly hostile to unmarried women teachers. It kept up a barrage of propaganda and was more than willing to caricature women colleagues as twisted spinsters with personality disorders.
33
Stanley Hall's insistence that men should carry authority over women if schools were to be healthy places appealed strongly to NAS types. The NAS enthusiastically supported the marriage bar, which required women to relinquish their posts if they acquired husbands. That many women teachers wanted or needed to earn, and enjoyed their work, and the fact that even if all single women teachers had wanted to marry, there weren't enough men to go round, seem not to have affected their arguments.

In 1917 a senior mistress at Bournemouth High School warned pupils that the shortage of marriageable young men after the war ended would mean that only about one in ten of them could expect to find husbands.
34
The girls would need to develop other goals in life. Nevertheless the late Victorian notion that girls' schools encouraged their pupils to develop unwomanly
ambitions and damaged their femininity received another stimulus from a book published by a woman doctor, Arabella Kenealy, in 1920. This book was called
Feminism and Sex Extinction
.
35
Kenealy saw herself as a eugenic feminist, but deplored what she saw as the ‘decadent and demoralizing vogue of the flapper'. Trouser-wearing and smoking young hoydens were the product of girls' schools that had lost their way, she proclaimed. Feminists had to shoulder some of the blame for this because they had insisted on competing with men. High-school girls were unsexed by an education designed for boys. A cult of competitive field games turned middle-class girls into grim-visaged hockey addicts with mannish thighs and sinewy forearms.
36
Even in the elementary schools, neglect of woman's true mission was producing ‘a race of stunted, precocious, bold-eyed, cigarette-smoking, free-living working girls, who fill our streets, many tricked out like cocottes, eyes roving after men, impudence upon their tongues, their poor brains vitiated by vulgar rag-times and cinema scenes of vice and suggestiveness'.
37

Kenealy's rhetoric cannot have appealed to everyone, but her arguments struck a chord with educationalists at government level who had indeed begun to wonder whether girls were suffering from a schooling based too much on male models. In the same year that
Feminism and Sex Extinction
was published, for instance, the Board of Education set up a committee to consider whether there should be
more
sex discrimination (they called it ‘differentiation') between boys and girls in secondary schools.
38
This committee reported in 1923. It emphasised yet again the importance of not overstraining adolescent girls with exams. It contended that schooling should prepare girls and boys for adult life, and suggested that ‘The broad difference between boys and girls – that the former will earn the family income and the
latter will administer it, bring up the children and look after the house – is relevant as far as the majority are concerned.'
39
The committee conceded that things were changing and that more women were turning to professional careers or wage-earning than in the nineteenth century. At the same time it suggested that the movement for the emancipation of women ‘has now perhaps achieved sufficient success to be no longer so potent a source of inspiration'.
40

Feminists often felt themselves on the defensive in education between the wars. There was a backlash against women's work in some quarters as men returned from the battlefield. The London medical schools, which had reluctantly opened their doors to women students through the war years, promptly closed them again.
41
A rash of novels indicted selfish women clinging to their jobs while ex-servicemen languished, unmanned by their inability to find work.
42
The reality, especially for educated women after the war, was that jobs were in short supply. Women graduates found themselves in a particularly difficult situation, especially those who had studied science. There were stories of women with first-class degrees in science working in sardine factories during these years.
43
In the 1930s, openings in teaching – long regarded as both the safest option and something of a last resort – were drying up through an oversupply of qualified women.
44

Working-class women, many of whose horizons had expanded during wartime, often found themselves pressed back into domestic service. Indoor domestic service still represented the largest single category of work carried out by women. It carried a low social status and had long been unpopular. Conditions of employment varied, but were commonly experienced as harsh, and with long hours, and those who ‘lived in' often reported that their sleeping quarters were in chilly attics or smelly basements.

In a survey carried out before the First World War, many women had insisted that ‘service is like prison'. The wearing of cap and apron was seen as a humiliating badge of servitude, and women servants sometimes complained of being treated like machines, or even ‘dogs' or ‘reptiles'.
45
Conditions had scarcely improved since the war ended.

In some areas girls had little choice. Winifred Foley, born in 1914, grew up in the Forest of Dean. Leaving school at fourteen, she and many of her friends looked for jobs as live-in servants in the nearby town of Cheltenham, ‘Where in the 1920s everybody who wasn't a servant was a somebody; including the snooty little Pekes and Pomeranians, creatures rated much higher in their mistresses' eyes than the servants.'
46